William Werner Boone (16 January 1920 in Cincinnati – 14 September 1983 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American mathematician. He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the University of Cincinnati. Alonzo Church was his Ph.D. advisor at Princeton, and

Kurt Gödel Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an imme ...

was his friend at the Institute for Advanced Study. Pyotr Novikov showed in 1955 that there exists a finitely presented group ''G'' such that the word problem for ''G'' is undecidable. A different proof was obtained by Boone in 1958.

Selected publications

*W. W. Boone, ''Decision problems about algebraic and logical systems as a whole and recursively enumerable degrees of unsolvability.'' 1968 Contributions to Math. Logic (Colloquium, Hannover, 1966), North-Holland, Amsterdam. *W. W. Boone,

Roger Lyndon Roger Conant Lyndon (December 18, 1917 – June 8, 1988) was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan.. He is known for Lyndon words, the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem, Craig–Lyndon interpolati ...

, Frank Cannonito, ''Word Problems: Decision Problem in Group Theory'', North-Holland, 1973.

References

*''Kurt Gödel: Collected Works'': Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman, Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G, . * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Boone, William Werner 1920 births 1983 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians University of Cincinnati alumni Princeton University alumni American logicians University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty People from Cincinnati Mathematicians from Ohio Group theorists